Month: May, 2012

Admission was free. It was billed as a production of an original play starring young people from DC’s SMYAL (Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League). They were going to perform it one night only, Saturday, May 26. I couldn’t resist.

And wow, what an extraordinary experience it turned out to be.

The set was three rundown sofas. The lighting could not be drearier: on-off church-basement florescents. The uncomfortable seating: metal folding chairs.

But once the powerful storytelling took off, I was as emotionally hooked as I have ever been in the theater.

The center sofa is home to Dre, a brother who has sex with men, and Lily, his unsuspecting and very pregnant wife.

The sofa stage right is the apartment in which Dre has set up Brandon, his 17-year-old lover, who is HIV-positive and devil-may-care about using protection.

The sofa stage left is where Jason, Lily’s brother, lives with his lover, Liam, who is HIV positive and desperately afraid of infecting Jason.

The central unbilled character in this drama is, of course, the HIV virus. By the end of this giftedly written two-act passion play, we have witnessed—as if attending a Greek tragedy—the preventable pathos of that protagonist’s rampage.

Author and director KD Monroe has crafted a funny, sad, street-smart, and cinematically succinct parable that the audience connected to as if it was the saga of their lives. I found myself reflecting that the groundlings at Shakespeare’s Globe must have vocalized their evaluation of characters’ words and actions just as fervently as did the outlier crowd that night. I felt privileged to be present at something like theater’s primal, communal origins.

This play must go on. It is a hauntingly honest cautionary tale. It is a tribal anthem for a generation.

In All That Jazz, Bob Fosse’s semiautobiographical movie musical, the main character is a brilliant though self-destructive director/choreographer played by Roy Scheider. As he faces himself in the mirror every morning, pulling himself together after a night of hard living, he forces a grin and says to himself, “It’s show time!”

Those words are iconic for everyone who loves theater—especially after the house lights dim and just before the stage light come up.

I have my own version. On countless occasions in that anticipatory, in-between-life-and-art moment, I have whispered “It’s magic time” to my theatergoing companion (and, of course, to myself).

In this blog—which I’ve named after that excited interjection—I plan to recapture some of my experiences that have come just afterward.